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Facebook, Instagram, And WhatsApp Are All Coming Back After An Epic Outage, But Not Everyone Is Happy About That

It was a crazy day on social media Monday, just not on Facebook and its sister services Instagram and WhatsApp. The week kicked off with a massive outage at the social media company. Jokes flew wild…on Twitter. But by the end of the day, all three services started slowly roaring back to life.

It all began around 11:30 EST, the morning after 60 Minutes aired a shocking — though not that shocking — report from a whistleblower about how higher-ups allegedly allowed various strains of misinformation to spread because it was good for traffic. As the company was being accused of favoring profits over public safety, they suddenly went AWOL. Around 6:30 EST, some seven hours later, the company announced — on Twitter — that things would soon be back to normal.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

It remains a mystery what happened, beyond some vague chatter about “networking issues.” All three services spent the day reassuring people — again, on Twitter — that they were on it.

Though the outage caused a lot of jokes, some pointed out the parts of it that are no laughing matter. Some suggested that Facebook Inc. should run afoul of antitrust laws.

But there were also jokes.

And there were also people who wished Facebook Inc. hadn’t come back.

But Facebook et al. are back, so at least your uncle who falls for misinformation about horse drugs is happy again.